CEO’s looking to make dramatic transformations should learn from Sanjay Jha at Motorola. When Jha joined as co-CEO in 2008, Motorola's share of the U.S. mobile phone market was 7%, down from 60% in the 1994*. Jha estimated that if he didn't deliver killer products in 14 months, for Christmas 2009, Motorola was finished.

Jha arrived to find an organization that was focused on fighting the last war--mostly with itself. Motorola had missed every major transition in the cellphone market--to 2G, to 3G, to color, to camera, to touch, to QWERTY keyboards, as Jha noted. It was poised to miss smartphones, too.

Jha quickly diagnosed the situation, but, rather than just issuing orders, he worked within Motorola's engineering culture, where good arguments can carry the day as long as people get to air their views. Jha met with top executives and others and personally reviewed key projects. He took the time to build trust and support. He rallied and focused a demoralized organization.

Jha then reorganized to eliminate duplicate efforts and infighting for resources and customers. He eliminated the entire Symbian product line, which wasn’t making any money, and killed phones using several other operating systems. When Microsoft missed a key mobile Windows release date, Jha made his final move: “Burn the ships and focus on Android.”

Unlike Stephen Elop at Nokia, who would later get behind Microsoft’s Windows, Jha’s bet on Android was less about its supplier (Google), and more about Motorola’s biggest customer, Verizon. By betting everything on Android, Jha married Motorola's future with that of Verizon, which desperately needed a response to AT&T's exclusive iPhone deal. (Nokia, on the other hand, isn't addressing a pressing unmet need on the part of mobile operators.) The Motorola Droid sold faster than the original iPhone, saving both Motorola and Verizon.

It is not clear whether the Droid's success would have been enough to keep Motorola competitive in the bruising global mobile device market. It was enough, however, to motivate Google's $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola's phone business in August 2011. That acquisition price was roughly the market value of all of Motorola in 2008. The still-public piece of Motorola, which makes telecommunications equipment for businesses and government, has a market cap north of $14 billion. So, in three years, Jha almost doubled the market cap of Motorola as a whole.

*Update — Market share statistics corrected to state that Motorola had a 60% market share in 1994, not the "late 1990s" as originally written.